The online grading and code review system demonstrated by Greg Wilson‘s students from the University of Toronto is really cool, and the kind of thing I’d love to see open-sourced and spread. I know my alma mater would find it handy!

Things I particularly like about it:

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The support for rubrics makes grading much easier and more consistent.

Hmm, maybe the student view can be improved by making it easier for students to see all their projects.

Suggestions:

Per project views, etc.

Accessibility guidelines

Downloadable spreadsheets

Usable for code reviews for open source projects? Won’t be grading, of course, but interesting for annotation…

The developers said that Turbogears made development much easier. One of the biggest challenges that faced them was cross-browser Javascript. Another is that the school uses a different authentication system (Kerberos) than the one used by Turbogears.

Quotiki has live search for quotes, which would be good if it was more
responsive. For example, the search “caesar” just shows the results
for “ca” even after a while. Tagging and bookmarking is great, of
course, and if I can get a fortune file or RSS for my favorite quotes
(there *must* be an RSS feed for this and all the other views), then
that would be fun to pull into my blog.

Hmm. They’ve got some kind of hyperlinking going on when you hover
over the quote, which may make it difficult to copy the text.

A podcast of quotes, too. Hmm. It’s nice to go into the history of
these quotes. =)

Smalltalk is a fun language. I ran into it when a friend told me about
Squeak, which is this *totally* awesome little 3D Smalltalk
environment which you should try if only so that it can warp your
brain.

I would do more Smalltalk, but Squeak is not fun to use when you don’t
really have a mouse. =) Maybe when I get a proper computer.

Kudos to the presenter for structuring the presentation for quick and early audience participation, and for taking on the challenge of writing something in realtime! =) He’s doing a quick tic-tac-toe game with the help of some PHP code he prepared before and a framework called PBJ, which isn’t linked on the Democamp site and is near-impossible to search for.

Look at that, programming with maybe a hundred people in the
audience catching missing parens and stuff like that. =)